CAP Twelve Years Later: How the "Rules" Have Changed: "In its classic interpretation, the CAP theorem ignores latency, although in practice, latency and partitions are deeply related. Operationally, the essence of CAP takes place during a timeout, a period when the program must make a fundamental decision-the partition decision:

CAP theorem - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "In theoretical computer science, the CAP theorem, also known as Brewer's theorem, states that it is impossible for a distributed computer system to simultaneously provide all three of the following guarantees:[1][2]
Consistency (all nodes see the same data at the same time)
Availability (a guarantee that every request receives a response about whether it was successful or failed)
Partition tolerance (the system continues to operate despite arbitrary message loss or failure of part of the system)"